Android's Lead Reduced (comScore via TechCrunch)comScore released its latest quarterly figures on the state of the mobile market in the U.S. based on active users, and while the exact numbers are different, the basic picture is the same as the one that Strategy Analytics painted earlier in the week around smartphone sales: Apple’s iOS continues to see the strongest gains and Android has remained in the lead but with its lead reduced somewhat. There are now 234 million U.S. residents using mobile devices, with smartphone usage up 4% to 110 million, giving the country a smartphone penetration of 47%.

Google's Fiber "Proof Of Concept" Is Anything But (Launch)Everyone wants fiber. The evil folks at cable companies and telecoms are sabotaging fiber in order to maintain their legacy businesses: be they content in the case of Time Warner or phone calls and text messaging if it's AT&T. As the Internet gets faster, you spend more time online. This is one of the core tenets of Google's success. Instead of adding features to Gmail, YouTube and Google search, they historically focused on making things faster. Why? Because speed drives usage. Google Fiber is not a test, it's a takeover plan.

Google+ Big Brand Adoption Growing (Search Engine Watch)Three out of four of the Top 100 brands are now on Google+. In the past two months, Visa, Hermes, and Wells Fargo have all joined the Google+ network with their own fan pages. Growth is slowing, but that’s to be expected, given the astronomical adoption rate among big brands when Google+ was first introduced. Of those with Google+ pages, 30% have these pages display in search results for their brand name, according to the BrightEdge Social Share study for the month of July. That’s 6x higher than in February. BrightEdge surmises, "This could be due to the rising importance of social content in search results along with the growing adoption of Google+ by brands and users."

No More Acquisitions Relating To Google+ (TechCrunch)This week in the tech news rumor mill: A source close to Google says that the company has put a stop to all acquisitions related to Google+, at least until the end of this year. Google is wary of both growing the Google+ team right now and providing the product with any additional resources until January. The Google+ project itself is not on hold but, if this rumor is indeed correct and Google is cutting back on expanding the team’s resources, this could be an indication that Google+ isn’t doing quite as well as the company’s glowing public comments would indicate.